Corey Is Bothered... In stores now is the
soundtrack to the motion picture Spider-Man. In case you don't already know,
there is a song on the soundtrack titled "Bother".
"Bother", as written and performed by Slipknot's Corey Taylor. How did this come
to be? What is the song all about? What does the song sound like?
Interview with Corey Taylor: "Bother", Spider-Man, and more (May 9th, 2002):
Roadrunner: Have you seen the movie Spider-Man yet?

Corey : I haven't had a chance to yet,
man. I'm freakin' out, I've been waiting for this movie to come out since '93
when James Cameron was going to direct it. The movie I've been waiting for most
of my life hits, and I'm in the studio working…but I'm probably going to see it
tonight.

Roadrunner: Very cool, what are you in the
studio working on right now? Corey: Well, I'm working on my side project that
was entitled Superego, but now I think we're gonna call it Closure.
Roadrunner : I was going to ask you a bit about your side project. How many
people are involved in it? You and…

Corey : Jim from Slipknot is in it. Two of
the guys from Stone Sour, the band I was in before Slipknot. Actually, Jim was
in Stone Sour as well. And a friend of mine who I've been working with for like
13 years plays guitar.

Roadrunner: How many songs do you guys
have down?

Corey: We have 16 songs, including
"Bother".

Roadrunner: So, "Bother", the recording
and writing, that was purely you, right?

Corey: Yeah.

Roadrunner: "Biggest Spider-Man freak of
all time", you have been quoted as saying. When did this all start? What is the
attraction?

Corey : It started when I was a kid - my
mom actually kept a lot of comic books around. She just kind of had them stacked
all over the place. As a kid, we were really poor so I didn't have a
lot to read, but I was an avid reader. So I'd start picking up these comic books
and reading them. I discovered Spider-Man and just fell in love with the
character. Everybody likes to talk about his
sense of responsibility, and that he's cursed with these powers…what I liked was
that he would just talk shit the whole time he was fighting the enemies. He
didn't take any of it seriously - he's staring into
the face of danger and he's just like 'Guess what? If it's gonna happen it's
gonna happen, I'm gonna win, and that's just the way it goes.' I really looked
up to that, ya know?

Roadrunner: "Bother", this was written
what, seven years ago you've said?

Corey: Yeah, about seven years ago. I
wrote it on the dashboard of my friend's car as I was moving back from Denver,
back to Des Moines. I wrote the lyrics in about six minutes.
When I finally got home I grabbed the guitar because I didn't want to lose it,
and I worked the music out. It was basically just something that I would play
once in a while just for myself.
And then when I was doing the demos for this side project, I went in and
recorded it - just on a whim, real quick, real barebones, me and a guitar. It
fell into the hands of Denise Louiso at Sony.
She heard it, she flipped out…it just kind of went from there.

Roadrunner: What's the song about?

Corey: The song is just about the time I
was moving back from Denver - I just felt really broken down because I moved to
Denver to try to move forward with my music. I just got to the
point where it was like 'nothing is going to happen for me in Des Moines.' Ya
know, how ironic is that? I moved out to Denver and found out it was the same
way all over the place.
It was actually worse in Denver because at the time nobody gave a shit about
original music, it was all cover bands out there. I was so used to being able to
do what I wanted in Des Moines.
I actually fractured my arm at a party and I lost my job out there so I was
literally living off bottles and cans. It got to the point where I had to move
back, just no way it was working for me
out there. So I move back to Des Moines and that song, I had been toying with
the idea of that song for a while. And I just hit the dash lights and wrote it
down in like 5-6 minutes, and I just kept
humming it the whole way home.

Roadrunner: Obviously, you had no end use
in mind for this song at the time, correct?

Corey: No, no, not at all, man. Ya know, I
have forty or fifty songs just like that, all acoustic. I write that stuff for
me. It was just one of those songs where if I never get to do anything with it,
at least I have a recording of it.
So it just turned into that, and through the grace of God it ended up in
somebody's hands. It's funny how fate works.

Roadrunner: The whole Spider-Man
soundtrack, did you actually pursue that or did it just happen?

Corey: You know what, I'd been telling my
ex-manager to get me on the soundtrack for a year. As soon as I found out it was
happening, I was like 'look, I don't care what you do, I don't care
what you say, you need to get me on that soundtrack…'

Roadrunner: You wanted that song on it in
particular.

Corey: Oh, absolutely. If there was any
song that was going to be on there, it was going to be that one.

Roadrunner: And why was it "Bother" over
any of the other 40 songs you have written acoustically?

Corey: Just for the fact that if you read
the lyrics, it's all about following your path in life even though you know it's
not the path that you want, and it's not the path you really have in mind.
And it kind of fits along with the whole Spider-Man theme, ya know? If you look
at his powers, it's a blessing and a curse - he's cursed to fulfill his own
destiny because of this, and yes
he gets to help people and what not, but at the same time he has to live with
all this stuff going on in his life and really deal with the downside of
everything. So the lyrics, the
feel of it really fit in with what is going on in the movie, I believe.

Roadrunner: Very well put, very well put.
Couple more questions. The side project, how often you guys playing right now?

Corey: Actually, we just got done
recording the album. We're just trying to get it mixed and mastered and all that
stuff.

Roadrunner: You recorded all sixteen
songs?

Corey: Yeah.

Roadrunner: What do people have to look
forward to hearing, sound wise?

Corey: It's really good - It's real
melodic, it's more hard rock, but it's still heavy, by all means….it's really
heavy. But at the same time it's nowhere near as heavy as Slipknot is. This is
more
of like Metallica meets Alice In Chains. It's really good stuff and I hope
people dig it.

Roadrunner: As for Slipknot, dvd is in the
works right now, and you'll be playing some upcoming shows in Europe, so
festivals…

Corey: Yeah, some festivals in August…

Roadrunner: Other future Slipknot plans in
the works right now?

Corey: We (Slipknot) are gonna get
together next year and start working on a new album. For right now, this side
project is pretty much my only priority.